Don't bogart that NET, my friend

(How cool would it be to have a computer with a steering wheel? This photo shows how a "home computer" could look in the year 2004.)

Like Dave, I particularly liked how Abbate emphasizes the role that users have played in the development of the Internet over the years, but I share his questioning of this narrative. Here’s how I see it.

Internet users, she argues, aren’t just consumers: they also help to define and develop the Internet, and those definitions and developments, Abbate explains, aren’t merely of the technical sort. She closes her Introduction with a great comment that almost seems like a nod to those of us in the social sciences: “[. . .] the meaning of the Internet had to be invented—and constantly reinvented—at the same time as the technology itself” (6, emphasis added).

In chapter three, “The Most Neglected Element: Users Transform the ARPANET,” Abbate begins to suggest exactly how early Internet users contributed to its development. She explains that new developments like TIP, ANTS, ELF, and USING came about as users at various ARPANET stations defined new needs and new applications for ARPANET. She discusses how users’ enjoyment of email defined a new “major” function of the net and explains its popularity by saying that email provided access to people rather than to computers (109). Abbate even jokes about shady drug deals that were orchestrated by “Inventive students participating in the early 1970s counterculture” (107).

But frankly, I’m suspicious. None of these people sound like “users” to me; they sound like wunderkind computer science graduate students (yes, even the stoner ones). Now, granted, in the “Dream Weaver” era (I mean the song, not the website-making software) computer technology wasn’t available or understandable to the average person. I totally get that. On the other hand, today—when computer technology and internet connectivity is available to most Americans—I still don’t think that users define the direction of the Internet. While I’d like to believe in Abbate’s narrative about users, I don’t think I do.

How much power does the average user really have over the Internet? You can post a video of yourself on Youtube, but then again, you can only do that because the website and its developers made that possible. Youtube probably existed before your ability or desire to post videos of yourself did. Then there are blogs. You can start a blog in about five minutes and use it for political rants or to make copyrighted material available and in doing so stick it to the man. But will your blog change anything? Will anyone even look at it or be able to find it? I keep trying to think of ways that users can change or develop the internet, but I can’t. All I can think of is Youtube, Blogger, Ebay, Craigslist, and MySpace. That suggests to me that users don’t control the Internet; corporations do.

These kind of sites don’t allow us to do anything but what their templates provide. The whole idea of “My” in Myspace is a total misnomer: the ads everywhere show that it’s not really “your space” at all. It’s hired space. And the fact that you’re given these fairly standard templates into which you can insert your pictures and text again suggest that there are serious limits to the “My”-ness.

In other words, I don’t believe the average user can play a role in the development or transformation of the internet. I believe all we can do is what corporations—through popular websites and applications—allow us to do.